Rafael Barrera Oro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Thu, 03 Aug 2006 10:04:14 -0300:
> Thanks, ill do that shortly, sorry about the posting thing but i dont > fully understand what i did wrong. Not a big deal. As I said, you were only following the guy ahead of you, and even if you weren't, it's not like you posted HTML or a virus or something with security implications. Rather (and again, this isn't pointed just at you), consider the following (obviously fictitious) example, and how much more difficult it could be to follow with the replies at the top, quotes at bottom. Mary wrote: >Sam wrote: >>Henry wrote: >>>Elizabeth wrote: >>>How do I stop my cat eating the furniture? >>Have you tried putting a velcro cover on? >That's ok if you do not have children, but they tear the velcro - what >then? Try guaranteed child-proof super-velcro: I have been using it ever since I had my fourth child - and my sixth cat. That example is taken from http://www.blakjak.demon.co.uk/gey_stv0.htm I've learned to deal with reading both directions, but I always reply right side up (top quote, bottom reply), and if my upstream thread did things upside down, it becomes far harder to maintain proper context. The key is to quote and reply to only one point at a time, editing or summarizing the quote so it's obvious the point you are replying to, and rarely is none of your reply onscreen (so no quoting several pages to reply with two lines at the bottom). Besides having the reply out of context, top posting encourages people to forget to trim to only the points they are replying to, sometimes making it difficult to figure out which point they had in mind. If the quote is properly trimmed and replied to point by point, that's not an issue. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
